In the title track, “Extraordinary Machine” Fiona sings:

If there was a better way to go then it would find me

I can’t help the road just rolls out behind me

Be kind to me, or treat me mean

I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine

It’s a great line from a very well written, sung and produced song. And how many of us (trans or not) couldn’t identify with those verses. Coming to grips and hopefully at peace with our own lives, we may indeed come to the conclusion that if there was a better way to go, it would find you.

In “Better Version of Me” Fiona has some equally interesting lines:

I am likely to miss the main event

If I stop to cry or complain again

So I will keep a deliberate pace

Let the damned breeze dry my face

I won’t give away some other yummy tidbits from that song, but I think you’ll agree, when you listen, that it’s not just catchy, but it will give you pause to think as well. Maybe in your life and mine we’ll realize that stopping to cry and complain isn’t going to do anything, but keeping a deliberate pace moving forward will. Overall the album is well produced, it’s a joy to listen to. It is also uncommon music. What I mean by that is that it’s not the same top-40 watered down pap that you hear on the radio. It’s far better. With much more variety and excellent musical skills being demonstrated. And that not clinically, but richly with deep feeling. It’s really a joy to listen to.

Go pick up “Extraordinary Machines”, it’s a very good album, that is not only meaningful, but fun as well. At the end, you too may come to the conclusion that you are an Extraordinary Machine.

Flossing Your TeethI personally have real difficulty getting this to work for me. But, it’s tough for me to whine about this when flossing can reportedly add 6.4 years to your life! In fact, 21st Century Dental notes on their site some studies on flossing and health:

The best of these studies done at Emory University with the Centers for Disease Control, indicated that people with gingivitis and periodontitis have a mortality rate that is 23 percent to 46 percent higher than those who don’t… why? They are linked to increased rates of cardiovascular disease and stroke, as well as to an increase in mortality from other causes, such as infections.

Taking care of your feet
Obviously, I have an appendage fetish (I wrote about hands last week here , now feet, what??) in any event…would you let your hands look like the bottom of your feet, provided you actually looked at the bottom of your feet? If you have big cracks and fissures in your feet, going to the local drug store to buy some off the shelf anti-athlete’s food medicine isn’t likely to really fix the problem. Your probably going to need a prescription drug like Lamisil to really clear up the infection. Then you need to make your feet pretty - no ugly cracks and callouses! I’ve been using a foot emery board (also known as fine grit sand paper mounted to a stick) and Burt Bee’s Coconut foot creme. Vaseline works pretty well too, and is alot cheaper.

Washing your hands
We covered this one pretty well when I posted on hand washing at this link here. Suffice to say, wash ‘em!

Sleep
This is a toughie isn’t it? Of all the things you can do, this one is probably at the top of the list of important things but at the bottom of what we really do. Why is that? Guilt (”Oh no I’m actually resting!”), too big a todo list stealing hours when we should be resting, other more exciting things to do (like eating chocolate).

There is so much data on the benefits of a good nights sleep it’s hard to believe most of us simply don’t do it. To quote Dr. Ellington Darden in a chapter on sleep and recovery from exercise, from his excellent book, “A Flat Stomach ASAP“:

Your body is a complex factory that is constantly making hundreds of delicate changes to transform food and oxygen into many chemicals required by various parts of the system. But there is a limit to the chemical conversions that your recovery ability can make within a given time. If your requirements exceed the limit, your body will eventually be overwork to the point of collapse.

Important to note if you fall asleep while driving. Some states are trying to put accidents caused by drivers who fall asleep into the same category as accidents caused by the driver being drunk.

You can find reams of information on sleeping on the net, most of it accurate (click to this Yahoo search link for a few of them here). But let me just highlight a few points (from page 67, “A Flat Stomach ASAP”, and the APA)

• Sleeping in 90 minute increments is best. That’s a complete sleep cycle in which your body goes through normal sleep, rem sleep, and then normal sleep again. Practically, this means 7.5 hours of sleep will be better for you than 8 or 7 due to it being six 90 minute cycles

• Having trouble figuring out complex issues? Sleep on it. That’s when your brain works out complex problems. Your much more likely to have the solution in the morning Can’t sleep because of the complex issue keeping you awake? Don’t take a shot of whiskey! Instead, write the problem out on a piece of paper, sort of placing it to the side in a sense.

• Do you have a few pounds to shed before lounging at the beach this Summer? Sleepers (those with 7 hours or more on their pillow) are much more able to control their appetite and as a result their eating. While those who sleep 6 hours or less put their bodies under stress. The body responds many times by craving carbohydrates (can you say a whole bag of Oreo’s!!)

Fish Oil
No you won’t grow fins, scales and crave krill. BUT you will have healthier skin and hair, strengthen your immune system and reduce your risk of both cancer and heart disease! Wow, now that sounds fishy doesn’t it? Well fish oil will do that for you. It’s so proven that the American Heart Association recommends it (see info here). BUT (there’s alway a but buttin’ in…) Most fish are spoiled with mercury, so it’s wise to consider a supplement that actually screens that out. There are two that I know of, there are probably alot more. One is Carlson’s Brand Fish Oil and the other is from the Stop Aging Now website (note, Beck’s Cafe gets no reimbursement for pointing you to those links, we just want to be nice to you ).

So, to ward off some of the little nasties that can fell you, try the little giants to get health on your side.

We are here using our own little copy of Wordpress and selfhosting at A Small Orange. Thank You’s are due to the template’s original designer Andreas Viklund which was Ported by Ainslie Johnson. To make it work for Beck’s Cafe I had to put some love into it of course!

*just a little p.s.* All links, categories and archives have been copied from the Typepad site to this new blog. So if you have a favorite article you bookmarked, you might want to consider changing the bookmark to reflect the permalinks from our new site.

If you answered (b) your taking a low tech approach and that may be a key to doing better and thinking smarter when you need a breakthrough. Jeanne Sessum over at Blogher wrote about this at this link here, and the original article was posted at Working Solo, which you can read here.

The thoughts they share on using low tech to make a breakthrough is worth giving serious consideration too. In fact, when working out this blog, I used *gasp* PAPER and PENCIL to outline:
* layout
* my publishing schedule (YOU have a publishing schedule Becki? uh Huh *cough* a loosely defined one)
* And how I wanted the flow to feel.

And I’m doing the same on my next blog too (ahh if only php and html were that simple!…)

And for stuff that people actually pay me money for (read: work) I use a HUGE white board (the size of a wall actually) to draw and make lines and arrows…because when you sit back and see the big picture you can actually think about the problem at a high and more integrated level. This is very important to solve a host of issues in your job - and in life. Going low tech allows you to see connections and patterns you wouldn’t otherwise. In some ways it actually empowers your brain to think “outside of the box”. That’s something we can all use as jobs get more competitive and creative solutions more needed.

You can get the [Potato] Salad of Love recipe at this link here
Oh you can also persuse over 143 Potato Salad Recipes and have your own showdown. Click this link here at The Food Network for all those yummy recipes.

There is an immense crisis in the world. Where does helping the miserable and the helpless fall in the priorities of Jesus’ people? If you go around churches and Christian circles and listen to what’s being discussed and watch what’s being done - what will that say about our priorities and our passion? What do we truly care about?

“He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing.”
- Deut 10:18

Some of the statistics are interesting regarding hand washing and how amazingly effective this simple step is to keeping ourselves and others health.

• According to a study done of 305 Detroit school children, youngsters who washed their hands four times a day had 24% fewer sick days due to respiratory illness and 51% fewer due to upset stomach (Reuters New Media, 12/10/96 )

• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) did a review of surveillance data for U.S. foodborne disease outbreaks from 1988-1992 and found that poor personal hygiene was a contributing factor in 1/3 of the cases. If people had washed their hands, they’d be 1/3 less likely to get sick!

• Day care children have a 30% higher likelihood of diarrhea than those cared for at home and day care professionals have higher rates of diarrhea as well. Hand washing of both the child’s hands and the day care professionals hands can cut infection rates by 50%. (U.S. FDA statistic).

• What’s the best defense against the potential Bird Flu? Washing your hands! According to Sian Griffith’s, Director of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health at the Chinese University, “It’s very glamorous to talk about (antiviral drug) Tamiflu and vaccines, but actually, wash your hands, cover your mouth when you sneeze, then wash your hands…It is really basic, it’s a bug that spreads like any other bug,” (there’s much more in this interview on MSNBC, “Hand washing best defense against bird flu” so click to read here).

What amazes me about these statistic is how fragile we are as humans. Our bodies are beautiful machines, intricately designed, self-healing and incredibly adaptable. They are also amazingly fragile. My infection took only 5 hours to come near killing me. We are fearfully and wonderfully made - but a bit fragile at times!

So how do you wash your hands? Well it’ simple, choose a soap of your liking (soft soap is good either anti-bacterial or not, bar soap appears to keep germs on it at times) put on the warm water, and scrub all parts of your hands for 15 second to 30 seconds. Then dry with a clean towel (disposable is best, otherwise a clean towel. The old used ones actually are bacteria havens). The act of scrubbing your hands with soap and water and rinsing them physically loosens and removes the bacteria from your hands (see the Mayo Clinic’s excellent write up by clicking here).

I think for me though, it’s a sad loss of the Bell Labs Research Institution.  I’m all for companies being stronger and more able (though frankly the record of that happening in mega mergers like this is very low, please see stories about the lack of success of megamergers here @ C/net, and here @ HBR).  But the United State’s private corporate labs (such as Bell Labs) and our public labs (such as Lawrence Livermore) are national treasures that helped keep our country a technology leader.  For sure, Bell Labs won’t disappear and the defense piece will be kept in tact under U.S. influence.  Still, this just feels like a sort of dismantling of some national treasures.

What were the causes of Lucent’s demise?  Probably too many to list, but there’s a well done article on this by Chinese blogger  Dr.Richard Zhao Liang (赵粮) that is well worth a read.  You can see his article at this link here.

The man’s humor was different.  It was more one liners and more challenges to the audience that they had better laugh, his material was funny!  His flow was off too, probably just a bad night, but while he is a funny, national headliner for comics, he seemed more prone to goad the audience into laughing about his material than telling a story to have them laugh with him.  It was an interesting contrast between the two.

That got me to wondering about humor between men and women.  Have you ever wondered how they differ or are the same?   Well there’s a great article, written by Gina Barreca, at Ms. Magazine entitled  "Real stories, real laughter, real women" that I think you might like that talks about this.

Gina Barreca makes this interesting observation about the differences:

The difference, in fact, between men’s humor and women’s humor seems to
be the difference between revolt and revolution. Masculine humor has of
course included digs at the conventions of the world, poked fun at the
institutions and establishments, but without the truly anarchic edge
that characterizes feminine humor. Women’s humor calls into question
the largest issues, questions the way the world is put together.

She also makes note that feminine humor has been and is often hidden:

Why has the feminine tradition of humor, ubiquitous as it is, remained
essentially hidden from the mainstream? In part it is due to the
Tupperware mentality that sought to preserve humor by keeping away from
the potentially hazardous male gaze. If men didn’t find funny what we
found funny, then they would think we were foolish. If they thought our
joking was foolish, we might learn to like it less ourselves. It wasn’t
worth the risk.

You can read the whole article for yourself by clicking to this link here.

(photo courtesy of benhamin’s photos, used under Creative Commons license)

You would never know it from looking at
her, but she had a prosthetic leg, had been through WWII, worked at a
spy for both the British and the U.S. and had received the highest
medals for distinguished service from Britain, France and the United
States for her work in WWII.  If it weren’t for her pivotal role, key
parts of the war against Germany in France would not have been won by
the Allies.

The book, "The Wolves at the Door:
The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy" penned by
Judith L. Pearson is a fabulous true story of Virgina Hall.  Born in
the United States, yet with an incredible passion for Europe,
particularly France, Virginia accomplished more in her lifetime than
most people even dream of.  Perhaps the best part of the story though
is not what she accomplished but the obstacles she had to get over in
order to accomplish them.  I won’t spoil the story for you, but those
obstacles were physical in terms of her body, and discrimination, for
being a woman.  In the end, her amazing tenacity and inventiveness
and sheer passion for her life’s mission - being a spy and helping to
defeat the German’s - allowed her to rise above and triumph.

The book is one of those little
treasures.  Well written and about a niche topic that is very
valuable to read.  I highly recommend it.   Grab some tea, curl up on
a couch, and read!

You can get the book at your fav book store or at Amazon by clicking on this link here

4/1/2007 Update
The site, Laura5, has been permanently disabled by the owner.

There’s many different kinds to use, though they all basically work the same. You load the program onto your computer, click on the little icon, tell it where your remote host is and voila, your can start moving files over to the other computer at will and at ease. There are many you could use from for your WindowsXP desktop, such as Ipswich WS_FTP and Globalscape CuteFTP. Both are very highly rated but they will run you $39 for the package with no support. And at the Frugal Tech, we do love a bargain, so we’ve hunted down something that works as well, and, is far cheaper. Free in fact.

The program is called FileZilla and it rocks. You can learn about it from this link here. FileZilla is a fast FTP and SFTP (secureFTP, for extra privacy on your transfers) program for Windows with a lot of features. There is even a server side version (if you so desire one). The license for this software is under the GNUGPL (General Public License) meaning that it is free for you to use or to tell and give to others. Just don’t sell it, that’s a no-no.

FileZilla makes me hot ….purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr …. it’s free, it’s supported, it’s got neat license, and it works!!…….get it here, Note, there are like 4 or 5 zip programs. I was confused for like a day until I realized you only need to download the zip package that is labeled: “FileZilla_2_2_19a_setup.exe” All the others you won’t need. Download that file to your computer, then click on it and run it and you’ll be as happy as I am :).
(Oh, for MAC users out there, you might want to try CyberDuck, I’ve heard it is fabulous, though I have no personal experience with it).

**update 06/17/06**  The current version as of this update is 2.2.2.4b and the right file to download is “FileZilla_2_2_24b_setup.exe”

The need for gasoline drives the need for the oil to make it of course. With oil reserves reported to be falling, logic says that the time to think through our alternatives is now, (see counter argument that we have more not less oil at this link here or go see an interesting article that oil may actually be a renewable resource at this link here) Those alternatives could and likely should be in alternative energies that are (a) more sustainable, (b) get the U.S. more energy independence.

Instead, economics says that scarce but highly demanded commodities are of high value. So, investment is being done in heavy crude, new methods to pull out more oil out of old wells and snatching the oil trapped in shale and sand! That’s right. The real little talked about investment in energy is not in solar, wind, hydrogen, or bio - it’s in oil. It’s really all about economics, as oil prices have gone up, it’s driving more thought and investment in finding more oil. The dollars are now in chasing this scarce commodity to get in on the higher prices. In case you hadn’t noticed, oil company profits are at a record high.

I don’t have a personal beef with this approach or with anyone making a profit, it’s what makes free markets work. But it strikes me as odd that on one hand we can be talking about our energy independence and the need to develop and rely on renewable sources, but then be determined to drive further investment into oil. I’d prefer someone just saying “hey we are hooked to oil and it’s not going to change, here’s how we’re trying to be more energy independent. It involves more oil, not less, and here’s how - oh and we are still looking at how we do clean energy from coal, hydro, solar, wind, etc.”

Go take a peak up to our Northern Neighbor to see what’s happening up there for a glimpse of this at work. The shale/sand oil thing in Canada is drawing huge investments.According to the March 27th 2006 WSJ article entitled “Oil Giants Turn Sludge into Gold”, Canada’s northern forest contains at least 174 billion barrels of recoverable oil; that’s enough to keep the planet running for five years. Indeed Canada becomes the 3rd largest holder of reserves in the world with shale/sand oil. And that is drawing enormous investment; $70 billion dollars over 10 years by a number of worldwide energy companies - ChaChing! Ah, but there’s no free lunch. This is heavy oil, not that sweet stuff from the Saudi Peninsula that is less expensive to get and process. This heavy crude generally costs more to produce and it takes more energy to turn into gasoline. Another downside, it releases up to 3x more greenhouse gases.

Just for grins, here’s some comparisons of oil investments with solar and wind. Keep in mind that Canada shale/sand oil alone is seeing $70 billion investment over 10 years. That works out to $7B per year!

• Solar: According to a December 28, 2005 MSNBC report, “Venture capitalists embrace solarenergy” (click to that link here) a “whopping” $67.7 Million was invested for just the first three quarters of 2005. On the good side though, a November 29,
  2005 article in Renewable Energy Access entitled “BP Plans New Division with Clean Energy Focus” (click to that link here)
  indicates that British Petroleum (BP) is investing about $200M peryear over the next three years in Solar

• Wind: Wind energy saw investments of approximately $1.5B in 2005, according to a September12, 2005 article from Dow Jones (click to the article here). That’s alota turbines spinning for sure.

But the story doesn’t just start and end there with the economics of oil. New technologies that allow old oil fields in the U.S. to be amazingly more productive are being developed and brought on line. Can you believe that California could soon be pumping enough oil to pump up U.S. reserves an amazing 2.5% . I bet the Governator never pumped that much iron in all his bodybuilding days! What makes this amazing feat of natural resource strength possible are new technologies and computer models that make it possible to squeeze even more oil out of existing supposedly declining sites. You can read the details at this link here (wow!)

The point to all this is that until the economics makes sense we won’t be seeing a wholesale move to renewable, more environmentally friendly resources any time soon. While the logic of it makes sense (”Hmmm, more renewable, environmentally friendly resources means that perhaps our world will be healthier to live in for our children, and for the other species here, sounds like good stewardship of the planet to me….”) the economics will beat logic every time in this scenario. Hopefully that will change sooner rather than later.

Just when you thought you’d heard enough jargon to choke a horse in business, here’s the new buzzwords so you can impress your boss and befuddle your colleagues, (source material courtesy of the March 27, 2006 Wall Street Journal).

• Delayering - The process of reducing organizational layers by firing the middle management
• Web 2.0 - Second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate, and share information online; generally the applications “feel” more like desktop applications. Using it in your business plan is also a nifty way to get some venture dough!
• Knowledge Acquisition - Hiring people who know how to get the job done
• Unsiloing - Being able to cooperate across departments, share resources, cross-sell products and basically learn to work as a team in an organization, one department or business unit to the next.
• Execution - Used to be known as strategy, which was the endless talk of planning to do something to execute. In todays world, we skip strategy (andthinking) and just execute.
• Volume Sensitive Business - A business with massive fixed costs (and no way to cover them). Niche Strategy - Perhaps should rightly be worded, “niche execution”, it simply means your company is a small, insignificant player.
• Limited Downside - code word for “things can’t get much worse”

• Purging the attic of all the stuff you’ve accumulated the past say, 15 years
• Purging yourself of food if you happen to suffer from a purging eating disorder
• If your a plastics processor, you might be thinking of a purging compound to help in the removal of stubborn residues between color or resin changes.

But if your transgendered, purging is about that little ugly secret that those of us who are transgendered don’t talk about much. It’s that one thing that is the tease of a “cure” to having GID (gender identity disorder) that is based on self-reliance and a white knuckles attempt at changing who you are at your most basic level.

This whole topic has had me thinking since I myself purged back in October of 2005. When I wrote the article about what was going on with me at this link here, I thought my move to embrace my transgendered nature, of being a different gender from that which I was born with, made me less of the kind of person I wanted to be. I honestly thought, “wtf”, my trying to figure out the nuances of moving more forward were taking me backward away from who I wanted to be. Who did I want to be? Well, a person more passionate about life, more alive and fun to be with, with a bigger giving heart, with more desire to see others prosper, to help the downtrodden, to be more like Christ, and many other things I knew (and know) are locked inside me someplace. In short, I just wanted to be more of who I knew I was supposed to be.

What I saw in the mirror, though , was someone who’d become rather ugly and sad. Someone who was more closed not more open, more sinking to her addictions, not more prone to love. And so for me, the seeming answer was, enough of this non-sense, this is surely a hobby that has no benefit. Surely it’s not making me or my spouse any happier, so this has to go.

So, I purged in an attempt to be “well” and to “cure” my being trans, and to make others feel better. But what I found was actually just the opposite. Having quite literally “tossed” who I was, I slowly slid into numbness, listlessness, and strange sense that the world was only 2-dimensional. I could see it, I could touch it, but I was unable to connect with it or the people that inhabited it. In short I had slipped into a clinical depression that I didn’t even recognize until I was told by my spouse and a mental health professional that I was clinically depressed and needed to do something about it - and quickly (perhaps my not having moved from a chair for 3 days should have alerted me, but, hey I was toughing this one out). That woke me up to realizing, that purging wasn’t the answer for me, and I would suggest if your reading this, and are transgendered, it’s probably not the answer for you either.

So I hauled myself, both in reality and metaphorically, back together and started to reflect on what was going on when I purged; and perhaps what might be going on with you should you be considering a similar “cure”. Your mileage will vary of course, and only you can determine for yourself your path. None-the-less, here’ some food for thought on your journey. One you surely didn’t ask for but that you own none-the-less.

What I discovered, in my reflection was that I hadn’t really been embracing anything about my basic make-up that was now starring me in the face. Instead, I’d been hiding and really not accepting the genetics of the situation that I’m transgendered-woman and there’s
probably not a whole lot I could do about it. A clear path has been laid out that many follow either clinically or informally and you can
read about it at Dr. Anne Vitale’s web site here. Despite this data, I had been going through some physical movements but not come to grips with the facts of why I was actually doing them. Not having come to grips, it had become easier for crutches (read: addictions) and excuses to fill the gaps yet empty my soul of my very being.

I also discovered, in coming back from my purge, that it takes work to be sane, but it’s easy to be sick, or maybe un-well is the better word. I mean that in both the physical and the mental vein. I think a quote from the press release about Felicity Huffman’s performance in “Transamerica” might sum it up best. In that press release they referred to the main character’s “unwillingness to be a victim, her journey of discovering her true self and her triumph over her life’s challenges”. That’s a very loaded quote, you have to read it a few times to let it sink in. And then you have to reflect on it given the realities of your life situation today.
You might be interested to know there’s some data out there on purging as well:

• A informal web based survey at Yvonne’s Place (about 1200 people responded, 1999, almost all male-to-female from what I can tell) showed that fully 1/3 of all the respondents had purged within two years of the survey.
• The purging or even “dropping out” effect seems to cut across the transgendered spectrum, from transexuals to crossdressers. There is a hunger to just be normal. It goes something like this If I just purge and forget this thing, I’ll be fine, I’ll be normal.
  Or, If I just de-transition, life can go back to normal, it’ll be fine.
• It is almost always somehow tied to shame or guilt about being who we are. That is, we are transgendered persons and we are somehow wrong at some basic level. You aren’t wrong. Your just different, I’m just different. That’s not so bad really once you get past my warts (even a nice hunk of Dermablend can’t cover some of mine!).

It took me a while to come back. I then had to learn to step out and move forward to be “who I am” or as I prefer, “to just be myself”.
I had to relearn that I wasn’t so bad really and the world, while in some case harsh to the transgendered, isn’t really so mean in it’s entirety. So purging I found wasn’t the answer at all. The real answer was self-acceptance. I pray that may be true for you too and
that you may continue to accept yourself for as long as you live (whether your transgendered or gay or purple or even Republican).